Project High Five (PH5), an online community designed to help keep kids engaged in team sports longer, on Tuesday announced the official launch of the organization’s online platform.
While 30 million kids play team sports every year, 70 percent of kids quit by age 13. With this unprecedented decline in mind, Project High Five has launched to dramatically improve the youth sports experience through parent and volunteer coach education, online community building and easy-to-access tools and resources aimed at keeping kids engaged in sports.
Maheesh Jain, a founder of CafePress, co-founded Project High Five stemming from his personal experiences as a parent coach. “I wanted to build a place for parents, coaches and those who are committed to improving the quality of youth sports for the children in their communities,” Jain said. “By sharing data, experiences and answers, Project High Five will help parents make better choices when it comes to their kids, while also helping to improve local sports programs for everyone.”
Project High Five provides curated age-appropriate content, discussions organized by sport, and works as a survival guide for parents, a resource for coaches and a community for people who are passionate about your sports. Project High Five currently aggregates original, existing and user-generated studies, articles, videos and practice plans for nearly a dozen team sports, including soccer, baseball and volleyball, into a centralized feed curated and tagged for appropriate sport, age, skill level and topic by a team of professional athletes. This unique, kids-sports-focused community is a first, with no comparable youth-sports platforms available today.
“We believe in the vast benefits of youth sports, and our goal is to maximize participation. While we, too, are awed by the abilities of elite athletes, we prefer to focus on developing physical literacy in youth so they can enjoy and benefit from lifelong participation,” Jain said. “When it comes to parenting, we recognize there are no ‘right’ answers, since every child and family is different. Our goal at Project High Five is to provide resources and information to parents so they can make better decisions.”
